“However, we have imposed a severe penalty on ourselves in the process: a terrifying sense that while all we have left is the self, the self unfortunately does not amount to too much. The passion of believing and the passion of being have now been replaced by the empty stare, the ironic posture.” [David Wells, …
Folks Who Don”t Get Out Much
“The spirit of pragmatic modernity, which likes to flaunt a sophisticated and cosmopolitan air, is really carrying on like a provincialist chronological hayseed. We are entirely taken with ourselves, and outside the village we all grew up in, everything is unknown; we are entirely lost — chronological rubes trying to pretend that the end of …
Redemption In A Bottle
“It is hard to miss the redemptive themes in the many dreamy scenes of sensuality that we have so often seen in perfume advertisements, scenes that waft across the viewing public with the promise of bodily regeneration, even renewed sexual attraction, if one simply purchases the product.” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: …
Rivers, Not Ponds
“In other words, the young are always educated by their elders. God has placed them in this particular cultural river; our children have no ability to flow in a different stream. This principle is recognized clearly when we are talking about parents and their children — just one generation. But it applies, just as clearly, …
The Lure
“Advertising, which is a large part of our public world, has learned how to dip its bucket into the well of our inner desires and fantasies; it projects those desires and images as part of its merchandising prowess” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 109]
Intellectual Schizophrenia
“By distorting sphere sovereignty, these authors have embraced intellectual schizophrenia. What one believes to be true in one location (church), one must forget when entering the other church he attends (the lab). At the risk of sounding revolutionary, if something is false we should reject it, regardless of the source. And if it is true, …
Souls Without Gravity
“Thus the freedom to ‘be one’s self’ was soon held hostage to the views of others, the world of fashion, and the pressure of social trends. And without a clear sense of the self, the ability to deny the self began to weaken. Standards became blurry, and without a religious framework of meaning to give …
Despair Is Too Optimistic
“As Cornelius Van Til observed, moderns think they understand themselves. As becker’s writing evidences, even in their despair, they think that despair makes sense. But a man cannot even say, ‘Everything is senseless,’ without making sense; rebellious man is trapped in the world God made and not the world he can only partially and inconsistently …
Getting to Know You
“With some of our technologies, the encounters are superficial and we are engaged little. Others, however, intensify these relations. This is true of television, some of whose characters become more real to us than the people next door, for our contact with the person whose image we see is far more sustained, and perhaps far …
Unattainable Randomness
“A godless, Christless cosmos — impossible even to imagine, even for the sake of argument — is a fragmented pile. Worse than a pile, it j^&%n*&i^5 — fully and completely senseless. Even such random keystrokes exhibit far more order than is conceivable without Him; they move in a straight line, left to right. Order and …